The earliest posts on this blog were drafted way back in 2008 and published on Myspace. When the blogging aspect of Myspace was discontinued in the fall of 2010, I ported more than 150 posts over to this WordPress hosted blog.

The transfer went smoothly. But at some point, the photos embedded in those posts started to disappear. In the spring of 2014, I re-posted a few of the early hiking posts.

Recently, after reading and hearing media coverage of Marie Kondo’s books “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” and “Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up”, I’ve decided I’d like to do some more housekeeping of these old posts.

My first impulse was to simply delete them. Many are very short, more of a journal entry than a blog post. In fact, I actually deleted 10 posts, covering the first three months of 2008, all very short and all related to geocaching (they are sitting in WordPress trash and can be restored if I change my mind). None of these posts had more than 3 views over the past 5 years.

But after doing a little reading, I think it’s more complicated than that. What if I break links or create some other unintended consequence? And what about the fact that original purpose of this blog was to serve as a family journal?

I haven’t yet found an illustrated master class on the art of organizing and tidying up blog posts, so I’ll be spending at least a bit of time up front thinking before doing:

• Categories and tags – there are no tags attached to any of these early posts, which might be part of the reason they have so few views and the categories are outdated.
• Photos consume a lot of space – there’s an annual cost associated with storing photos on WordPress, so I’d like to explore storing the photos associated with these older posts somewhere else (Flickr, perhaps) and linking the images in via url. Plus I can’t help but wonder if this is the better way to go with all my photos.

Repairing these frayed blog posts (and possibly deleting some of them) will be a bit of a project. If you’ve undertaken something similar and have advice on how to proceed, please leave a comment.

I don’t yet know quite how I’m going to tackle this, but I expect the biggest benefits will be the opportunity to reflect on just how much my photography has improved and to enjoy an extended walk down memory lane.

Written for 20 Days of Chill: A Fading Memory (Day 5). The 20 Days of Chill Writing Challenge is running Monday through Friday in January. It’s pretty chill – participants can post every day or just one day. The list of daily topics is posted here.